In My Dreams I Dance

In my Dreams I Dance

How one woman battled prejudice and setbacks to become a champion

Anne Wafula Strike

To Norman,

my son Timothy,

my dad George Paul Wafula

and Mama Florence

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter One Walking and Running

Chapter Two The Day My Life Changed

Chapter Three Joyland

Chapter Four A Terrible Loss

Chapter Five The Coup

Chapter Six Growing Up

Chapter Seven Romance

Chapter Eight Bachelor of Education

Chapter Nine A Proper Job

Chapter Ten Not Quite Mills & Boon

Chapter Eleven This Green and Pleasant Land

Chapter Twelve A Miracle

Chapter Thirteen Getting the Fitness Bug

Chapter Fourteen Going Home

Chapter Fifteen Athens

Chapter Sixteen Medals

Chapter Seventeen A Bitter Blow

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

‘Get down! Get down!’ barked the soldiers as they boarded the bus. Sweat dripped from their faces as they pointed their guns at us all. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry with fear and I was trembling from head to foot. I felt as if I was a character in a nightmarish action movie. The air was heavy with tension and the smell of stale sweat.

Many of the passengers obediently fell to their knees, sobbing and shaking hysterically. The soldiers were pushing down those who were too slow.

‘Please don’t shoot us! Put the guns away, we beg you,’ a few of the women murmured. I could hear some people whispering prayers for deliverance.

I started screaming hysterically. I was just 13 years old and had never been so terrified in all my life.

‘Get down, young girl,’ the soldiers said, turning their guns on me. All I could do was look back at them, too frozen with fear to explain why I couldn’t lie on the floor like the other passengers. Helplessly, I pointed to my callipers and crutches and hoped they would understand. Strapping and unstrapping the callipers took about ten minutes, so there was no way I could get down quickly.

The soldiers glanced at the callipers, but kept their guns trained on me.

It was August 1982 and we’d just pulled into the bus station in Nairobi. Everything was happening in slow motion. I felt as if eternity had passed since the soldiers boarded the bus, although in reality it wasn’t more than a few moments.

I searched frantically through the bus windows for my dad. He had promised my teachers that he would be waiting to collect me. At that very moment he hurried onto the bus. I was shocked to see that he was carrying a black machine gun and was wearing many magazines of bullets. Although I’d seen him in his army uniform many times before, I’d never seen him armed and ready for action like this.

‘Stop pointing those guns at my little girl!’ he shouted at the soldiers. They hurriedly lowered them.

In a lightning flash my dad picked me up and put me over his shoulder. Holding me with one hand and his gun with the other, he gestured to one of the soldiers to carry my crutches and bag.

‘What’s happening, Dad? Please tell me what’s happening!’

‘I’m going to take you somewhere where you’ll be safe, Anne,’ he said briskly. ‘We’re in the middle of a coup. I’ll explain everything to you when things have calmed down. Come, we must hurry, things are very bad in the streets.’

I wished he would put his scary gun and bullets down and take me home.

Before I could utter another word, he started running. As we hurried through the streets, I heard people calling out, ‘Run for your lives!’

My dad put a coat over my head to shield my eyes. But I had already seen some of the horror.

I started to cry.

Chapter One Walking and Running

You have to travel through the Great Rift Valley to reach the village where I was born. It’s a small place called Mihuu in western Kenya, about 500 kilometres from the capital, Nairobi. Only a few hundred people live there and it has little more than a modest market and a mill to grind maize. The nearest town is Webuye, one of the stations on the main rail line from Kampala, in Uganda, to Nairobi. Webuye is surrounded by the steep, rocky Chetambe Hills, and Mihuu, with its rich, fertile soil, nestles behind those hills. The red volcanic earth is good for growing many crops—millet, sorghum, bananas and sugarcane. Life is tuned to the rhythm of the seasons—everything revolves around planting, weeding and harvesting.

I was born on 8th May 1969 in a mud hut. My grandmother and many of my female relatives were there to help me into the world.

‘This one has come out more easily than the others, even though she’s the heaviest,’ my mum said, sighing with relief.

The women gathered round to coo over the new arrival. My grandmother cradled me in her arms and said, ‘This child is a real beauty and she’s slipped into the world so easily, she’s a blessing on us all. I’m sure she won’t give you any trouble in life.’

My mum’s friend Annah, a wonderful singer, had sung to me while I was in the womb. She had held my mum’s stomach and said, ‘This child is going to be great.’ My mum and dad named me Annah after her and this was later changed to Anne. My African name is Naliaka, which means ‘born during the weeding season’.

The language spoken in the village is Luhya, which is also the name of a big tribe in the region. My family belongs to the Bukusu clan, a section of the Luhya tribe.

I’m the fourth born of eight. First came Alice, then Kennedy, Jane, me, Evans and Victoria, who are twins, Goddard and Geoffrey. I also have three step-siblings, Irene, Melvin and Arthur. Kennedy, my oldest brother, was named after the US President Kennedy. My dad said he hoped he would rise up and be at least as great as Kennedy. Evans’ middle name is Lincoln, after Abraham Lincoln, and Victoria was named after Queen Victoria. Geoffrey was named after Geoffrey De Freitas, a British ambassador who became a Labour MP. Goddard was named after a British judge my dad admired.

My dad started life as a Muslim, Athumani Wafula, but later converted to Christianity and changed his name to George Paul. He is a very well-educated man and has always had a mind wide open to new challenges and ideas. He has always understood the possibilities the world holds for his children and has pushed us to strive to be the best we can possibly be. He admires the British way of doing things and is very well read in British and American history. He is a very fair, loving and upstanding man. I couldn’t wish for better.

When I was born he was a warrant officer in the Kenyan African Rifles and it was more than a month before he was able to return home to see me.

‘I was hoping for a son,’ he said, grinning and looking lovingly into my eyes. ‘But I’m just as happy to have a girl. She’s so beautiful.’

‘Yes, this one is the strongest of all our babies,’ my mum said proudly.

My mum was called Nekesa Ruth. Nekesa means ‘born during the harvesting season’. With Kenyan names, people can roughly guess when your birthday is.

My mother’s parents were very devout Quakers. My mum herself was a friendly and generous person and also strikingly beautiful. My dad often tells me that he fell in love with her as soon as he saw her and asked her parents there and then if he could marry her.

Our home was simple, but to us it was beautiful. The floor and walls were made of mud and cow dung, and a certain type of reed that grew near the river made a cool and shady roof. We had five rooms, so it was quite a grand place by village standards. We had no electricity, but used kerosene lamps to read by in the evening. Our entertainment was a radio and a battery-operated record player. We listened to Voice of Kenya, which began its broadcasts at 5.55 every morning.

My dad played lots of old Motown records and early James Brown. I still remember my older brother and sisters and my cousins wearing bell bottoms and platforms in an attempt to look like the singers on the record covers and dancing to the soul routines. We younger ones weren’t allowed to join in, but we used to peep through the door, enviously looking at them having fun. We would also make up words in Swahili that sounded about the same as the English words.

Life in the village was very traditional, with people looking after their animals and cultivating small pieces of land. A father would share his land with his sons and it would be passed down the generations. At that time people grew just enough food to feed their families and took very little to market to sell. But now things are slowly starting to change. Increasingly, sugarcane is grown to sell because it fetches a good price. My dad used to grow maize, cassava, potatoes and bananas, but now he, too, is growing sugarcane.

When I was a child, food was always plentiful because my mum and my grandmother were out working hard in the fields. Any surplus was given to our neighbours. Sharing, especially of food, is a concept deeply ingrained in African life.

Water was collected from the river in a very organised way. There was one part of the river where the water was pure enough for drinking and another part where clothes were washed and the animals would drink. It’s the same today.

When I was born many children in the village didn’t go to school. But for my dad education was a priority. He had trained as a teacher before he joined the army and he valued learning for its own sake as well as a passport to a better life. ‘Education is the key to everything,’ he would often say, and he encouraged all of us to learn at every opportunity.

He also loved imparting knowledge to me and my brothers and sisters. He used to read a lot and was particularly impressed with the history of ancient Greece and the strength of its people. He explained to us that all the strong sportspeople used to gather at Mount Olympus. Because I was such a strong and healthy child when I was born, he gave me Olympia as a middle name. He thought this would suit me. Even as a small baby, if I kicked against his stomach when he picked me up, he said he could really feel the power of my foot.

‘Olympia is a good name for you,’ he told me. ‘You are going to be a very strong and special girl. I believe you will achieve great things.’

Tradition was a very important part of life for our clan, as it is to this day. Bukusus believe in many things that Westerners would find strange. Most of the people who have never been to school believe in black magic. They call it ‘African science’. When someone has died mysteriously, people say, ‘Oh, we think African science was involved.’

When I was just a few months old, the women from our family went out to our farm. It was the harvesting season, Nekesa. My mum placed me carefully under the shade of a tree on an animal skin and some cloth. A little while later she came to check on me and screamed in horror: a black mamba was coiled around me.

These snakes are common in our village. Once my grandmother walked all the way back from the bush to the village with one wrapped in her bundle of firewood. She felt something tapping her on the back and thought it was one of the branches, but when she got home she discovered it was in fact a lethal snake. She carefully unloaded her bundle and called on someone in the village to kill the snake.

Faced with a snake wrapped around her precious baby, my mum fell to her knees and, with tears rolling down her cheeks, started begging the snake, ‘Please leave my child alone.’

My grandmother walked up calmly and hushed her. ‘This snake would have killed the baby by now if that’s what it wanted to do,’ she said quietly. She started praying softly and whispering something under her breath. The snake was obviously listening, because it lazily uncoiled itself and slithered away, leaving me unharmed. The tree where I lay is still there today.

At the time there was an old woman in the village who had a reputation as a witch, and the villagers started whispering that she had sent the snake to curse me because she was envious of my strength and beauty. No one could understand how I had survived such a thing unscathed.

In many ways I was a very lucky child. I was happy, lively, healthy, tall for my age and by the time I was nine months old I was already running around. Unlike my brothers and sisters, I’d never even needed to have any herbs gathered in the bush and boiled to cure various ills. In the first two-and-a-half years of my life, as I scampered around energetically on the soft earth, exploring my village and learning new words every day, none of us had any idea of the shadow that was about to descend.

Chapter Two The Day My Life Changed

I was too young to remember what happened next, but my family have told me the terrible story many times. As swiftly as a rainy season downpour drenches the earth, my happy, carefree life in the village ended.

My dad was away trying to stop the Shiftas, Somalian bandits, from crossing the border into Kenya and stealing livestock, when catastrophe struck. I had accompanied my mum to the river. As usual she was washing clothes and then washing us. I liked to carry a small pot of water on my head, copying the huge pot she balanced effortlessly on hers. But something was wrong with me that day. As soon as we returned to the homestead, I fell down screaming.

My family thought a snake had bitten me, even though none had been seen anywhere near me. But, after examining my writhing body all over, my grandmother, who was an expert in these things, pronounced, ‘No snake has bitten this child.’

My mum and grandmother could see that I was in terrible pain, but if it wasn’t a snake, what had caused it? They had no idea. Nor could they calm my screams. They told me later that I had cried for 24 hours, giving great heaving dry sobs when no more tears would come. At one point I was so distressed, I swallowed my tongue. And then my whole body went limp.

My grandmother was a Christian, so she prayed and poured holy water over me. When that didn’t work, she turned to traditional medicines. She was perplexed. Why was a previously healthy child suddenly unable to talk or eat? How could it be that I had gone down to the river apparently well and had returned terribly ill?

The more baffled everybody became, the more desperate the remedies they resorted to. My legs were massaged with donkey dung, tribal cuts were carved into my skin and foul-tasting potions were forced down my throat. Though my dad was an educated man, he too believed that the herbs could cure me because a British doctor had once told him that a lot of powerful western medicines were contained in them.

Alas, none of the traditional remedies did me any good. My condition was deteriorating and I was struggling to breathe. My family were convinced they were going to lose me.

In a flash of inspiration, one of the villagers found a plastic tube and put it into my mouth. Family and friends took turns blowing their breath into me to keep me alive. It was the primitive equivalent of an iron lung.

After a few weeks I recovered enough to breathe unaided, but my breathing remained very laboured and the bottom half of my body mysteriously withered, leaving me unable to move around. I was effectively paralysed from the neck down. I reverted to babyhood, no longer able to talk or to stop myself from dribbling. I shared a bed with my mum and she had to turn me over when I wanted to change position. With tears in her eyes, she fed me sloppy food because I could no longer chew anything. Her lively, inquisitive daughter had turned into a helpless rag doll.

‘What kind of illness is this?’ my mum and my grandmother kept asking each other. They had never seen anything like it before.

My immediate and extended family rallied round, but some of the villagers thought I’d been cursed and should be left to die.

Solomon, a local witch doctor, was called in to treat me, but he too drew a blank, muttering only that an evil spell had been cast on me. ‘This is caused by black magic,’ he declared.

People in the village started to shun our family. ‘They’ve been struck by a curse from God,’ they muttered. They couldn’t understand my parents’ determination to keep me alive. ‘She’s more or less dead—let her complete her dying,’ they said.

My dad didn’t discover what had happened to me until he returned home on leave six weeks later. He was distraught at this terrible transformation in his formerly healthiest child. ‘We’re not going to give up on our daughter,’ he said firmly whenever the villagers urged him to let me die.

So profound was his distress that he even forgot to shave when he went back to the army. Shaving regularly was a vital part of army discipline, but he told his superiors that he hadn’t bothered because it ‘wasn’t important’. He was promptly demoted for rudeness and lost out on being commissioned as a senior officer. My illness was not only affecting me but also those I loved the most.

Gradually some movement returned to my upper body, although from the waist down it remained like dead wood. Slowly and painfully I learned to pull myself onto my stomach, my thin misshapen legs and feet dangling inertly, and drag myself along the floor using my arms.

My mum and dad were delighted that I had regained some mobility, but this technique didn’t impress the villagers. ‘There’s a young snake living in that house,’ they chorused. ‘It is not right that it should remain amongst us.’ They gathered at our door and said, ‘You need to get rid of that child, otherwise the curse that has possessed her will spread to the other children in the village.’

My mum begged and pleaded with them to leave us in peace, but they were in no mood to compromise.

‘We’re going to burn your house down,’ they informed her. ‘It’s better that you leave now, before you all perish.’

Family members advised my mum to run away and we escaped to my maternal grandparents’ home in a nearby village. We stayed there until my dad was next home on leave.

The behaviour of the villagers made him sad and angry. ‘We have as much right as anyone else to live in our own village,’ he said. ‘This is our ancestral land.’

Defiantly, he rebuilt our home, substituting corrugated iron for straw so that the villagers couldn’t burn it down. But even with the reinforcements we continued to feel under siege.

My dad was confused by my illness. He had a modern, educated outlook but was also steeped in the traditions of the village and wasn’t entirely sure if my illness was a new disease or witchcraft.

He was also torn between staying at home to protect his family and continuing in the military so that he could pay for our schooling and give us the kind of life he had ambitions to provide for us.

Eventually, with a heavy heart, he decided to apply for accommodation in the army barracks in Nairobi for all the family. He thought that we would encounter less prejudice in the capital and hoped that I would be able to get some proper medical treatment there. He also thought that that way he could be closer to us.

His faith in me remained steadfast. ‘One way or another you’re going to recover, Anne,’ he said. ‘The local remedies haven’t worked, but in Nairobi you can get the most modern treatments.’

It was very hard for my dad to uproot his entire family and transplant us all into unfamiliar territory, but he felt he had no choice. He realised he wasn’t going to succeed in changing attitudes in the village and needed to keep his family safe.

So, one year after my illness started, our family gathered up our belongings and bade farewell to the villagers. Our relatives cried, but it was clear that many other people were glad to see the back of us.

In many ways it was a relief to my family to make a new start and our mood as we travelled to Nairobi on the JJ Family bus was quite positive. My mum and dad took turns at holding me on their lap.

The first thing my dad did after we’d settled in was to take me to Kenyatta hospital where I could be examined by a proper doctor. The hospital was overcrowded, dirty and chaotic and overflowing at the seams with people of all ages suffering from everything from malaria to malnutrition.

The doctor examined me carefully, moving my limbs in various directions and noting the shape of my spine.

My family gathered around anxiously. They hoped not only for a diagnosis but also a cure, so that the lively two-and-a-half year old who had suddenly been lost to them could at last be restored to full health.

Although my condition was a mystery to my family, the inhabitants of my village and assorted witch doctors, it wasn’t to the doctor at Kenyatta hospital. He looked at my body flapping helplessly like a fish on the shore and pronounced flatly, ‘This is polio.’

My mum and dad gasped.

I was too young to understand what was going on and lay oblivious to the sickening blow the doctor had just delivered.

‘But all my children have been vaccinated against polio,’ my dad said. ‘My wife walked many miles to the health clinic with Anne to make sure she had the vaccine.’

Some Kenyans chose not to vaccinate their offspring because they thought that whatever substance those strange syringes were putting into children’s bodies was a plan of the white man to reduce the African population. My family, however, didn’t share that view.

The doctor shrugged. ‘That’s too bad. But it happens sometimes. Maybe the vaccine was out of date and not that effective.’

He explained that the polio virus had attacked my spine, entering in an asymmetrical way and leaving it curved in two places. Some muscles had completely wasted away, though some function remained in others.

‘What can you do for her?’ my dad asked.

‘I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do for her now,’ said the doctor, shaking his head sadly. ‘She can have some physiotherapy to improve the movement in the muscles that are still working and a plaster cast to straighten out the limbs, but we can’t restore movement. We can’t repair the nerves the virus has destroyed.’

My mum started to cry. My dad put his arm around her and did his best to comfort her.

Polio is a virus carried in water and food that causes nerve damage. It attacks different parts of the body, leaving them withered and lifeless. There is a great deal of knowledge about how to prevent it now, but because it has been successfully eradicated in most of the world it is regarded as a disease of the past and not one that researchers are looking into anymore.

As I lay quietly on the examination table my dad sighed heavily, wondering what kind of life lay ahead for me. One thing was certain though: things were not going to be easy.

Still, he was determined to try to make the best of it. ‘Well, thank God my daughter has survived,’ he said. ‘We will find a way to make life as good as possible for her.’ He stroked my hair sadly. ‘You are a strong girl, Anne, and I know that somehow you will overcome all of this. I didn’t give you the middle name Olympia for nothing. I know that despite your polio you will still show the world how strong and powerful you are.’